Seniors Escape Usdan

By Silas Van Der Swaagh '13

We live in quite a bubble at Bennington. Over the past 75 years, a very distinct world has been molded and, while we are constantly encouraged to set our sights beyond it, it’s sometimes shocking to move outside the environment we have grown so accustomed to and step into the “real world.” At Bennington, we are encouraged to expand our academic focuses outside of just the classroom; “the world is your campus for seven weeks every year,” reads the FWT section of the school website. When not out applying our skills during FWT, though, we are encouraged to bring the real world into ours.

Our world, like the real one, seems to be experiencing some growing pains. With an ever-growing student body, the environment many students had grown accustomed to is rapidly changing. We have doubles as triples, triples as quads, and there are never any cups in the dining hall. There were three artists in this year’s senior show who seemed to be acutely aware of the rapidly changing ecology of our school due to its expansion and overpopulation and who responded artistically by literally spilling out of the gallery space and seeking to find housing for their art (and themselves) somewhere else. These three artists all seemed to raise questions of how they fit into their world, be it Bennington or the real one, how their art interacts with its natural environment, and how much control any of them really have over their creations.

Emma Dorothy Conley’s Floating Home and its counterpart, Floating Home Part 2: Adrift and Contained, provide an exceptionally insightful response to this discussion of overpopulation and environmental disruption. Almost as if she had been forced off dry land, Emma lived on the Bennington Pond for four days in a vessel she built. Structurally, her home was extremely simple. Scattered over the practically designed structure, however, were countless objects that were clearly chosen for reasons unnecessary to her survival on the lake. Colorful plastic balls, old plastic jugs, and even an old bike were all loosely strung around the boat in a way that suggested an attempted buoyancy produced by a nostalgia for dry land and more colorful times, rather than an attempt to stay afloat. Accented by her wonderfully constructed book of monotypes and lacquer-transfers, Floating Home Part 2: Adrift and Contained, Emma was able to capture a real sense of childish day dream in her preparations for catastrophe that is rarely found in the often doom-filled prophesies of the future. In her book of prints, she depicts her floating home becoming a spaceship and flying off to new galaxies. Although the presentation is ostensibly playful and almost naïve, Emma’s Floating Home provides a profound interpretation on the somewhat rhetorical discussion of our world’s impending destruction.

Marisa Prefer was another artist whose work was literally spilling out of the gallery. Breathing Room was a large, multi-colored nylon and cotton bubble that, when inflated, visitors could enter and interact in. When operational, Marisa’s balloon billowed out of Usdan’s back door onto the walkway outside. We were able to enter a private, disorienting world and interact within the bubble safe from whatever was happening outside. At some point during the opening night, however, the bubble deflated, creating was a very different experience than the one that the beach-ball colors seemed to suggest. With the bubble deflated, we were forced to grab hold of a climbing rope attached to the gallery wall and walk blindly out of the gallery and into the strangely cold orifice. Any sense of comfort that might have been added by the rope or even the feel of the cloth against our skin was easily countered by the realization that we were left completely exposed with our forms clearly defined to anyone or anything viewing it from outside— we couldn’t see them, but they could see us. Whether intentional or not, Breathing Room, like Emma’s Floating Home, forced the viewers outside of the safety of the gallery and, under the guise of bright colors and fun times, left them blind and exposed to whatever nature had to throw at them.

Eyla Cuenca, like Emma and Marisa, worked in a manner and scale that the Usdan could not accommodate. Her untitled 20’x27’ photograph, printed on vinyl, hung like a billboard on the side of Margot Tenney Theater, providing the most visually sinister representation of our prophetic musings. Depicting a desolate, snow covered stream off the side of a highway, Eyla enlarges and exaggerates the proportions of this scarred landscape and forces us to confront contemporary nature and how we have transformed it. However, rather than prompting a feeling of distance or even guilt in the viewer, Eyla’s display seems to embrace an interaction with nature that stands in stark contradiction to the almost apocalyptic image. Standing in front of the photograph as the sun sets on a warm Vermont evening provides a very different perspective of the wintery imagery than if it were inside the gallery space. Outside, the wind constantly rustles the billboard and the transparency of its vinyl mesh allows for the wonderful wooden siding of VAPA to add a rich texture to the dark forest in Eyla’s image. The most captivating interaction between the distinctly synthetic presentation and the natural world, though, results in the way the light affects the photograph throughout the day. The natural light provides an ever changing tone and color to Eyla’s piece that could never be accomplished indoors.

Like Emma and Marisa, Eyla took away some of the control in the presentation of her piece and left it exposed to nature, almost as an admission to the human disruptions featured in her image. Together, these three artists, though approaching a general subject with different mediums, goals, and concepts, provide a response to the increasingly prevalent discussions of our changing ecology. They couldn’t fit in the gallery, so they had to move outside, exposing their work to elements far beyond their control. Their art succeeded because of this bold decision.